Should we moderate ourselves to help grow the movement?
I’ve come across this idea before in the EA community and also thought about it a lot myself.
EA’s are known to do some pretty “out there” things to maximize their impact. Many of us give far more than 10%. I know someone who lives in a van and is a “freegan” to maximize the amount of cash they have to give. Personally, I live with my parents and have forgone overseas holidays to leave me extra money to give/save. I know that many people who ask me why think I’m crazy even after hearing my reasons.
What I worry about is that even if we don’t advocate things like this people will associate our behavior with effective altruism. Then they may think, ’well if that’s what being EA is then count me out”.
So I guess I’m asking, should we moderate ourselves while the movement grows? Should we live lives that are as normal as possible so that more people feel they would like to be part of the movement, so that more people feel they could become EA’s without sacrificing their current lifestyle?
The question is not going to be whether we should moderate ourselves- yes or no—but when and how much. Moderating yourself, consciously or unconsciously is part of being a functioning human.
I think I agree with most of your sentiments. Especially while EA is young and growing I see the importance of maintaining the image of EA as something that anyone can do while living a normal life.
Great question. We should definitely consider these reputational effects as they could be large.
I’d start by thinking about what portfolio might look best from the point of view of helping to grow the movement well. My guess is that this isn’t necessarily having everyone “as normal as possible”, but could well be in that direction from where we are right now.
Then when we’re thinking about deviations we can think about how large the reputational effect is and how large the benefit is. It’s actually pretty hard to estimate the size of reputational effect, but we should try. For example thinking about what the effect might be if the whole movement were doing it might be a reasonable first approximation. In some cases that probably underestimates the costs—if your behaviour is extreme even within the movement, it’s more likely to be picked up on and have a high reputational cost. In some cases that may overestimate the costs—e.g. if the whole movement were vegetarian that might appear weird and discourage growth, but having half the movement be vegetarian probably doesn’t.
It sounds to me that living in a van is likely to be erring too far on the side of ignoring reputation.
In your case, it might be that the best thing to do is to quietly continue not to take overseas holidays, but not talk about it much. Or to only take them occasionally. (Of course it could be that the not taking overseas holidays provides a useful talking point and helps more than it hurts—it isn’t obvious to me, but I’m glad you’re at least considering the question.)
I don’t think it’s a matter of reputation as much as a matter of socialization and network building. Humans are at their best when they’re interacting with other humans (generally speaking). If your actions based in EA motivations are hurting your personal relationships or your ability to socialize, either by constraining your living situation or by limiting your social interactions due to cost / time considerations, then they may be doing more harm than good. I think building a strong network of friends and colleagues is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and shouldn’t be easily discounted for the sake of simply giving as much money as you can.
Similarly, while going overseas for vacation is expensive and bad for the environment, sometimes seeing another place or culture in real life can have a lot of altruism-related benefits.
I don’t mean this to disparage your particular life choices, but rather to say that a “typical” EA shouldn’t be expected to make the same choices, and it shouldn’t be implied that making those choices makes you more effective or more altruistic than somebody else who focuses more on network building and travel, for instance.
First of all, effective altruist organizations, ones that explicitly exist because there effective altruism exists as a social movement, make it their shared mission to make people aware that people can be effective altruists, while still being totally normal. Not, like, even relatively normal, or sort of normal, but not requiring you, yes you, to sacrifice anything major you wanted out of life[1].
The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours exist to do this. The Centre of Effective Altruism incubated all these organizations, and now they’re starting a special project to build the effective altruism movement, and steer its public image, called Effective Altruism Outreach. It’s currently being led by Niel Bowerman. Your comment is one great concern that Effective Altruism Outreach was specifically started to handle.
Of course, as effective altruism grows, nobody wants it to become so diluted as a set of ideas that anyone can as validly call themselves an effective altruist as anyone else, without actually doing anything. So, the community itself must reach consensus on some standard, and each individual is responsible for holding themselves to it to maintain the integrity of effective altruism. Rob Wiblin covered this in his keynote address at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. As a shorthand, ‘anyone giving $10 to Oxfam’ was the hypothetical example of what an overly diluted effective altruism might look like.
The standard thus far seems to be 10% of lifetime income donated to the most effective charity (one can find). Now, this isn’t sufficient, so some caveats and distinctions have to be included, such as:
Of course, the 10% commitment was chosen as a round number favored historically by the donation standard prescribed by various world religions. How arbitrary it really is, and if effective altruism should rethink it, may be a challenged posed by the possible future success of The Life You Can Save. If the The Life You Can Save, which only encourages people to pledge at least only 1% of their income, ever hits some critical mass in how much awareness it raises, and the amount of money from as many people as possible, that no other effective altruist organization had yet achieved, it may force effective altruism to rethink how it presents itself.
In a way, the already thousands of effective altruists, hopefully of whom as many as possible will continue to be effective altruists, will demonstrate a cluster-thinking approach to lifestyle design for effective altruists. Effective altruism is a voluntary movement in which, aside from the narrow standard, not yet well-defined, above, one can choose to live how they wish. The commonalities of what makes life more functional for effective altruists will come to light as time passes, so what’s ‘normal’ for effective altruism, while still being ‘normal’ for the rest of the world at large, will become apparent.
I wish more effective altruists would share their personal stories, and how they differ not only in their donations, but lifestyle choices, from others. Luckily, effective altruists don’t even need their own blogs to do so, as they can post them to this forum. I will indeed make a new thread next time encouraging others to do this.
[1] The lifestyle written about in that post was written by Jeff Kaufman about the effective altruist lives his wife and himself are leading. They’re earning to give, in addition to raising awareness of effective altruism by updating how they build their life with effective altruism in mind, without sacrifice. Since that article was written, Kaufman and Wise have increased how much of their joint income they give from 30% to 50%, while raising their first child. They may be the best existing example of how normal effective altruism can be for any middle class person.
Should we moderate ourselves to help grow the movement?
I’ve come across this idea before in the EA community and also thought about it a lot myself.
EA’s are known to do some pretty “out there” things to maximize their impact. Many of us give far more than 10%. I know someone who lives in a van and is a “freegan” to maximize the amount of cash they have to give. Personally, I live with my parents and have forgone overseas holidays to leave me extra money to give/save. I know that many people who ask me why think I’m crazy even after hearing my reasons.
What I worry about is that even if we don’t advocate things like this people will associate our behavior with effective altruism. Then they may think, ’well if that’s what being EA is then count me out”.
So I guess I’m asking, should we moderate ourselves while the movement grows? Should we live lives that are as normal as possible so that more people feel they would like to be part of the movement, so that more people feel they could become EA’s without sacrificing their current lifestyle?
The question is not going to be whether we should moderate ourselves- yes or no—but when and how much. Moderating yourself, consciously or unconsciously is part of being a functioning human.
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
I think I agree with most of your sentiments. Especially while EA is young and growing I see the importance of maintaining the image of EA as something that anyone can do while living a normal life.
Great question. We should definitely consider these reputational effects as they could be large.
I’d start by thinking about what portfolio might look best from the point of view of helping to grow the movement well. My guess is that this isn’t necessarily having everyone “as normal as possible”, but could well be in that direction from where we are right now.
Then when we’re thinking about deviations we can think about how large the reputational effect is and how large the benefit is. It’s actually pretty hard to estimate the size of reputational effect, but we should try. For example thinking about what the effect might be if the whole movement were doing it might be a reasonable first approximation. In some cases that probably underestimates the costs—if your behaviour is extreme even within the movement, it’s more likely to be picked up on and have a high reputational cost. In some cases that may overestimate the costs—e.g. if the whole movement were vegetarian that might appear weird and discourage growth, but having half the movement be vegetarian probably doesn’t.
It sounds to me that living in a van is likely to be erring too far on the side of ignoring reputation.
In your case, it might be that the best thing to do is to quietly continue not to take overseas holidays, but not talk about it much. Or to only take them occasionally. (Of course it could be that the not taking overseas holidays provides a useful talking point and helps more than it hurts—it isn’t obvious to me, but I’m glad you’re at least considering the question.)
I don’t think it’s a matter of reputation as much as a matter of socialization and network building. Humans are at their best when they’re interacting with other humans (generally speaking). If your actions based in EA motivations are hurting your personal relationships or your ability to socialize, either by constraining your living situation or by limiting your social interactions due to cost / time considerations, then they may be doing more harm than good. I think building a strong network of friends and colleagues is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and shouldn’t be easily discounted for the sake of simply giving as much money as you can.
Similarly, while going overseas for vacation is expensive and bad for the environment, sometimes seeing another place or culture in real life can have a lot of altruism-related benefits.
I don’t mean this to disparage your particular life choices, but rather to say that a “typical” EA shouldn’t be expected to make the same choices, and it shouldn’t be implied that making those choices makes you more effective or more altruistic than somebody else who focuses more on network building and travel, for instance.
First of all, effective altruist organizations, ones that explicitly exist because there effective altruism exists as a social movement, make it their shared mission to make people aware that people can be effective altruists, while still being totally normal. Not, like, even relatively normal, or sort of normal, but not requiring you, yes you, to sacrifice anything major you wanted out of life[1].
The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours exist to do this. The Centre of Effective Altruism incubated all these organizations, and now they’re starting a special project to build the effective altruism movement, and steer its public image, called Effective Altruism Outreach. It’s currently being led by Niel Bowerman. Your comment is one great concern that Effective Altruism Outreach was specifically started to handle.
Of course, as effective altruism grows, nobody wants it to become so diluted as a set of ideas that anyone can as validly call themselves an effective altruist as anyone else, without actually doing anything. So, the community itself must reach consensus on some standard, and each individual is responsible for holding themselves to it to maintain the integrity of effective altruism. Rob Wiblin covered this in his keynote address at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. As a shorthand, ‘anyone giving $10 to Oxfam’ was the hypothetical example of what an overly diluted effective altruism might look like.
The standard thus far seems to be 10% of lifetime income donated to the most effective charity (one can find). Now, this isn’t sufficient, so some caveats and distinctions have to be included, such as:
does this include income before or after taxes?
Personally, I would qualify this commitment with what each individual effective altruist honestly tries as hard as they can to figure out what the best charity is given their best estimates and their personal values, even as they differ from those of others. In practice, such research is difficult, so I would recommend looking to evaluations independent of one another, organizationally, and across disciplines, converging upon the same solutions. This is what effective altruism calls cluster thinking, and it’s an epistemology the effective altruist movement is turning toward.
Of course, the 10% commitment was chosen as a round number favored historically by the donation standard prescribed by various world religions. How arbitrary it really is, and if effective altruism should rethink it, may be a challenged posed by the possible future success of The Life You Can Save. If the The Life You Can Save, which only encourages people to pledge at least only 1% of their income, ever hits some critical mass in how much awareness it raises, and the amount of money from as many people as possible, that no other effective altruist organization had yet achieved, it may force effective altruism to rethink how it presents itself.
In a way, the already thousands of effective altruists, hopefully of whom as many as possible will continue to be effective altruists, will demonstrate a cluster-thinking approach to lifestyle design for effective altruists. Effective altruism is a voluntary movement in which, aside from the narrow standard, not yet well-defined, above, one can choose to live how they wish. The commonalities of what makes life more functional for effective altruists will come to light as time passes, so what’s ‘normal’ for effective altruism, while still being ‘normal’ for the rest of the world at large, will become apparent.
I wish more effective altruists would share their personal stories, and how they differ not only in their donations, but lifestyle choices, from others. Luckily, effective altruists don’t even need their own blogs to do so, as they can post them to this forum. I will indeed make a new thread next time encouraging others to do this.
[1] The lifestyle written about in that post was written by Jeff Kaufman about the effective altruist lives his wife and himself are leading. They’re earning to give, in addition to raising awareness of effective altruism by updating how they build their life with effective altruism in mind, without sacrifice. Since that article was written, Kaufman and Wise have increased how much of their joint income they give from 30% to 50%, while raising their first child. They may be the best existing example of how normal effective altruism can be for any middle class person.